[critical] Source Code

Colter Stevens wakes up suddenly in a train to Chicago. Amnesiac, he has no recollection of being mounted therein. Worse still, the passengers behave with him familiarly as he has never seen. Disoriented, he tries to understand what is happening but a bomb explodes killing everyone on board.

Colter wakes up in a box strange and discovers that he is involved in a process experimental to project himself into the body of a person and relive the last 8 minutes of his life. Its mission : to continually revive the few minutes before the explosion to identify and arrest the perpetrators of the attack. At each failure, the chances of being able to go back in the past is dwindling.

As he tries to prevent the explosion, his superiors tell him that a second attack is in preparation in the heart of Chicago and that it is no longer to protect the few passengers on the train but the whole city. The race against the clock begins…

Author’s Note

[rating:7/10]

• Release Date : April 20, 2011

• Directed by Duncan Jones

• Film French, american

• With Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga,

• Duration : 1h33min

• Original title : Source Code

• Trailer :

Is it that you remember A Day without end ? Bill Murray reliving loop groundhog day, again and again ? The principle of the loop is simple and can reduce the costs of productions (” hey, we will be able to shoot 80 scenes in a single setting ! “). Yet it is not if used as it, probably because they get tired quickly and because this kind of singing is difficult to manage : develop and conclude a plot, in a short period of time circular, is not always obvious. But that’s the challenge that tries to take the Source Code, which is based on a concept of the same kind.

Hang in there, because it is complicated to explain. It follows 2 different timelines. The first, that is the reality, where a train exploded in the morning, the victim of a terrorist who plans to blow up all of Chicago in the afternoon. The second is that, frozen, for 8 minutes prior to the explosion of the train, rebuilt from the remains of the brain charred to one of its passengers. Jake Gyllenhaal can revive as many times as he wants these 8 minutes, by taking possession of the body of the passenger. His goal : to find out who is the terrorist in this parallel reality to the nab in real life before it has time to destroy Chicago. Each time he relives the 8 minutes, he grabs the new information, experimenting with different scenarios.

For you to locate the thing, it is more somewhere between Next (the film with Nicholas Cage, not the issuance of “speed dating”) and Minority Report that to Back to the future. The careful development of a SF unobtrusive manner that does not alter that in a minor way our conception of the world that surrounds us, clearly implies that the writer has had to eat some Phillip K. Dick to the shovel while he was writing the history of Source Code. This is all the more glaring when one realizes that the film quickly leaves the technological aspects aside to focus on the psychological impact they have on your main character.

Imagine the table : when Jake Gyllenhaal reliving the last 8 minutes of this train, he learns a little more each time to know his passengers, to appreciate, to feel compassion for them, his feelings els softer going of course to the lovely Michelle Monaghan sitting in front of him. Only, the reality in which he finds himself is as a matrix in the alternative that, in fact, has nothing real. The people to whom he was attached died since the morning. The woman with whom he falls slowly under the charm is the memory of a corpse. The sway of the SF and the human drama is what makes all the charm of the Source Code, which allows him precisely not to turn round and round and round.

Each character, at his small level, so has its role to play in the story. If you’re smart, you’ll have found the terrorist quickly enough, but nothing can prepare you for the coup de théâtre in the center that gives the second breath to the plot. A dramatic and heart-rending, that allows to inject sensitivity in a world of machines, and that will surely make you shed a tear. For where Source Code is surprising, it is by his apparent lack of ambition. In the confined space of the train or in the capsule that allows Gyllenhaal to travel in time, everything seems to be happening on a small scale. Duncan Jones, the director, is a type gifted, but who has not the sense of spectacle, of epic or grandiose, and, while the scenario in the left may be the possibility, the Source Code has not, therefore, the magnitude of an Inception, for example. As to whether it is a good or a bad thing, it is simply a matter of sensitivity.

There remains, however, that the film is good entertainment, who looks with pleasure from beginning to end, and that does not disappoint for a single moment. The scenario is stubbornly refusing to take the viewer for a fool by offering him to beat a few brains if the desire it takes, and has the luxury of some real big nuggets of emotion, not overdone, a rarity in the film industry the contemporary love stories must inevitably drip of marshmallow. The us is served by a realization of quality and a cast of quasi-anonymous, of a surprising quality… not enough to deprive.